Serendipity35

21st Century Learning at the Crossroads December 1 & 2 at Kean University in Union, NJ. Event co-Sponsored by the Center for Innovative Education (CIE) at Kean and the New Jersey Consortium for Middle Schools.

I'll be blogging some of the presentations here as the two days progress.

I'll be doing two sessions. "The Reading & Writing Homework You Don't Need to Assign" will take a look at the current research into what the Net Generation (which I prefer to "millennials" since the key seems to be their native netness rather than just the decade of birth) is using to learn without much help, guidance, or collaboration with their teachers and schools. I'm starting to believe that all students are distance learning students. They are reading and writing outside school without teachers having to make any assignments. Digital natives are using blogs, discussion tools, social networking, wikis, metatagging, image sharing and sophisticated search tools at sites like MySpace, Facebook, Flickr, Wikipedia, and YouTube. As we heard throughout the 1960's about television, they spend more hours online than they spend with you in a classroom. (They are actually spending less time watching TV than earlier generations.)

The follow-up session is "Taking Advantage of Learning 2.0." So many of the Web 2.0 applications that students are willingly using outside school have educators and parents concerned. Sites like MySpace and Facebook offer frightening personal information. Flickr and YouTube offer images that can shock us. And students turn to Wikipedia and paper mills for cut and paste research. As with earlier technologies, teachers need to familiarize themselves with these tools in order to guide students in their uses for educational purposes. I'll address some positive applications of these often negatively-portrayed online tools.